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Saturday, October 20, 2012

Halfway There!



We’ve reached the halfway point of our 11 weeks of training.  I realized I haven’t posted in awhile, sorry! 

After the third week of training ended, my group stopped having Spanish classes.  Since we are the advanced group, they only give us three weeks of class.  After that, we have to fill up our schedules with other activities and study on our own.  This frees up a Spanish teacher to work with some of the lower groups who need more help improving their Spanish level.  So, what do I do now?  It’s been weird not having class, but we’ve been doing a good job staying busy.

 We’re required to teach one class per week in the elementary school.  Since I like to teach and have tons of time now that there’s no Spanish class, I’ve been teaching two days per week, on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings.  It’s a sixth grade class of about 25 students, and the teacher is younger and really receptive to the kinds of activities that I’m doing.  Once we get to our sites, we’ll be co-planning and co-teaching, but right now I’m just teaching science on my own.  The teacher stays in the room with me and helps me out with explaining difficult concepts and classroom management.  The kids are always excited to do “dinámicas,” which are games and activities that get them up and moving.  I try to include at least one in each class so that they have a little motivation and can get up and move around.  I’ve taught 5 classes.  So far I’ve taught about renewable and non-renewable energy, potential/kinetic/mechanical energy, ways to save electricity/avoid accidents with electricity, and the nitrogen and water cycles.  I’ve had to do a lot of work brushing up on my science knowledge and reviewing the vocabulary, but everything’s going pretty well.  By the end of training I’ll have spent a lot of time in the classroom and should be more than ready to start working in schools once I get to my site. 

We’ve also been working with the “Club de Lectores” (Reader’s Club) at the library, which is a group of about 15 elementary school-aged kids.  There is a story and drawing contest that is going on now, and the theme is “Salvando el Medio Ambiente” (Saving the Environment).  We’ve been reading environment-themed books to the kids and helping them work on their stories.  Before I left the states, I bought “El Lórax” to bring with me here.  It was a struggle to read it with all of the crazy words and rhyming (it’s hard to read in English, and 10 times harder in Spanish!), but the kids loved it.  This week we read a book that was about things that kids can do to help the environment and then we went out to the park and collected garbage.  In a matter of 6 or 7 minutes, we collected 2 huge sacks full of garbage.  We saved the plastic bottles and we are going to use them to make crafts.  So far, the kids made maracas and we used some of them for bowling pins (with a coconut as a bowling ball!).  We plan on cutting the tops off the bottles and planting seeds with the kids to use up the rest of the bottles.

Last week, I went on my volunteer visit.  The point of the volunteer visit is to send us out on our own to navigate the public transportation and visit a new place in Nicaragua to live with a volunteer for a few days.  By living with a volunteer, we get a chance to ask a million questions about their lives and their work and get to participate in their activities and programs at their site.  Susana and I went to the department of Matagalpa for our visit.  We hung out with the environment volunteer that lives there and went to the rural school where he works, checked out the gardens that he’s made, helped build a stove for a family, and worked in his neighbor’s garden.  It was definitely a hands-on experience, and we got a chance to participate in his activities.  Some of the highlights for me were going to the rural school where he works and building the stove.  The school only had 2 classrooms, both with multi-grade classes.  The one that the volunteer works with is grades 3-6, which are the grades that environment volunteers work with (the younger kids don’t have science in their curriculum).  There were probably about 6 kids in each grade, and it was cool to see the volunteer and teacher work together to teach kids of all different levels at the same time.  The other cool thing we did was work on the stove project.  It’s a country-wide project to build improved wood stoves that families use to cook their food.  Volunteers write grants and receive money to build the stoves.  It is an improved model that uses less wood and has a chimney to prevent the family from inhaling lots of smoke while they’re cooking.  The stoves are made out of brick and a mixture of mud, horse poo, small pieces of dry grass, and water combined with crushed up aloe plants.  All of the stuff gets mixed up and used like cement.  It was a really cool project, and Susana and I learned a lot.  I’m not sure if it’s something I’ll do in my site when I’m a volunteer, but who knows!

I guess that’s a pretty good update for now.  Some other highlights:

  • I’ve been going to the gym with my host sisters…quite the experience (I’ll try to write a post about it soon)
  •   I went to Jinotepe (the city where my host sisters go to college) to go out for pizza for their birthday.
  •   We went out to the club in Masaya with Susana’s host brother, Fran.
  • I went on a hike with my friend Luis down to the Laguna de Apoyo.  It was a super difficult hike, especially on the way back up, but we rocked it.  We went swimming in the laguna when we got down there, and it was absolutely beautiful.
  • Our garden is growing!  Well, some of it.  A couple of squashes, all of our radishes, and the tomatoes in our seed bed are doing well.  We only ended up with one cucumber plant, so thats kind of sad.


Also- we’ll be finding out our sites on Thursday, the 25th.  They’re really keeping us in the dark and not even giving us a list of the sites where they’re sending us.  I’ll make sure to post when I find out where I’ll be living for the next 2 years!

Sorry for the lack of communication, but I promise I’m doing fine!

Hasta luego!